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When weather catastrophes hit, the big-ticket damages tend to come not from heat waves but from floods, hurricanes, and wildfires. Natural disasters caused billions of dollars in damagelast month alone, according to a recent report, from Canadian wildfires ($3.1 billion), to European flooding ($4.6 billion), to U.S. storm damage ($1 billion). The economic loss from 300 Indian heatwave deaths in April however …

The rewards of being right about climate change are bittersweet. James Hansen should know this better than most — he warned of this whole thing before Congress in 1988, when he was director of NASA’s Institute for Space Studies. At the time, the world was experiencing its warmest five-month run since we started recording temperatures 130 years earlier. Hansen said, …

Sea-level rise may be the most predictable outcome of climate change. Expanding warmer waters and melting land ice both contribute to flooding – and scientists agree that we are locked into sea-level rise for centuries to come. The question is not if we will retreat from the coast, but when. Still, the rush to develop the coast occurs at a maddening pace. …

Damages from extreme events like floods are even more relevant than the mean sea level itself when it comes to the costs of climate impacts for coastal regions. However, while it is now rather well understood how sea-levels will rise in the future, only small progress has been made estimating how the implied damage for cities at the coasts will …

Just a few more decades of ocean warming would be enough to destabilise the relatively small region of ice by the Amundsen Sea − starting a cascade of slipping and sliding that would tip enough ice into the ocean to raise sea levels by three metres. The loss of ice would continue for centuries. Two scientists at the Potsdam Institute …

‘What we call the eternal ice of Antarctica unfortunately turns out not to be eternal at all,’ says lead author of new study A new study published Monday warns that “unstoppable” melting in West Antarctica could make a three-meter increase in sea level “unavoidable.” According to researchers at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the vulnerable Amundsen Sea sector …

As a historic heat wave ravages the Middle East and glaciers continue rapidly melting into the sea, a “thought-experiment” devised by German researchers has demonstrated—yet again—that the best way to avoid the effects of catastrophic climate change is to keep fossil fuels in the ground. According to a paper (pdf) published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, geoengineering “technofixes” …

Scientists show that devastating increases in extreme rainfall over the last 30 years fit in with global temperature rise caused by greenhouse gases. LONDON, 13 July, 2015 – If you think you’re getting an unusually hard soaking more often when you go out in the rain, you’re probably right. A team of scientists in Germany says record-breaking heavy rainfall has been …

Leave it to Pope Francis, a Jesuit trained as a chemist, who has only one lung, to breath new life into a tired global environmental debate. It has been droning on for so long now that it has become background noise, easily drowned out in the din of the 24-hour news cycle. While the glaciers melt, and close to 2,500 …

If you think your doctor is hard to understand, try talking to a climate scientist. In late 2014, the World Bank published a remarkable document that should have shaken the international business world. Titled “Turn Down the Heat: Confronting the New Climate Normal“, it drew on 1,300 publications to explore the impacts of a world four degrees centigrade warmer – …